About me

Welcome to The Overrated Photographer. I’m a forty something year old Melbourne based photographer covering a broad range of genre’s from portraits to sports. I travel a bit for business so my photos are not confined to Melbourne.

I got into photography doing some kitesurfing photos, but with the arrival of my first daughter, my focus shifted to family and portraits. I still try to get extreme sports when I am not kitesurfing myself.

My current photography work is confined to personal or charity work for “not-for-profit” engagements where I am engaged in photography for a number charity events to give back to the community and help support fund raising for these organisations. These include the homeless and cancer events.

I do not currently do any paid commercial work as I run a successful non-photography related business and this allows me to explore my personal creativity with photography.

My gear

The early years

Some of you may know my history. I’m an ex-Fujifilm shooter, now with Sony.

Started many moons ago on a Nikon D50, progressively built up to a D700 and then finally a D750 before I sold up and went to Fujiland because I wanted to go mirrorless and Nikon didn’t even know if they wanted to do a mirrorless camera.I don’t think I actually took photography seriously in my early Nikon days. It was primary use of scene modes, sports mode for kitesurfing, landscape mode for landscapes etc. When I got my D700, I was thrown in the deep end and suddenly had to learn in manual mode as the D700 didn’t have any scene modes.

After a couple of years with the D700, I added the D750 to allow for dual bodies, with the D700 forming my backup body or allowing me to run dual bodies with a black rapid when doing events. I built up my pro glass with a Nikon 24-70 f2.8 and Nikon 70-200 f2.8, the 70-200 being my personal favorite.

The move to Fujifilm

After spending about 5 years on Nikon full frame as an extension to my Nikon APSC days, I saw some Fujifilm gear and was impresssed with the quality of the images being produced. At the same time, wanting to move to mirrorless, I found some of Nikon’s decisions to avoid mirrorless confusing and unclear.

As I started to investigate mirrorless, it quickly became clear that the move to full frame with Nikon is dictated through access to good glass rather than necessity to have full frame. I have covered a lot of it in my full frame vs APSC articles so I won’t address it in too much detail here.

For two years I was happy with Fujifilm, the colours were great, the glass was good and I liked the compact size.

The move to Sony

I left Fujifilm for personal reasons, nothing to do with the gear, I was happy with it, just not happy with the local importer and decided I was not going to give them anymore of my business, hence the move to Sony.

I’ll be clear, I’m not a massive advocate of the whole “full frame rocks” argument so if you’re expecting lots of articles about how full frame is better than APSC, you would be mistaken. I previously wrote an article during my Fujifilm days about APSC vs full frame and I stand by those comments…the vast majority of users aren’t good enough for full frame to make any difference.

So why then did I move back to full frame? I didn’t…I moved to Sony and their APSC offering like many of the companies is pretty dismal, Nikon has no APSC offering and even their new full frame offering isn’t compelling, Canon is in the same boat, and I’m not a fan of Micro 4/3rds so not a lot of options. If I made the call to switch in two years time, there may have been some better full frame offerings from Nikon and Canon, but nothing on APSC and that’s a whole lot of what if’s.

This is one of the reasons you won’t find much “big glass” on my site, there might be exclusions, the 100-400 which is going to be big whether you are on APSC or Full Frame. I’ve tried to go for glass that maintains similar glass size to my APSC days without compromising on quality. The problem with most systems is that they reserve the good glass for their 1.4 primes, Or 2.8 Zooms. As a result, if you want decent glass, you have to lug around huge lenses. My solution will be lenses like the Batis 85mm f/1.8, lenses that maintain their compact size, but offer outstanding quality. It’s not to say I’ll only be getting small glass, but it will be the exception rather than the rule.

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Donations

If you like the content and would like to make a donation, please don’t. I don’t need the money. I have an amazing wife who is incredibly understanding of my purchases along with a good job to be able to afford the gear I do. I run this site and write what I do because I enjoy it, not because I'm looking for financial reward.
If you have money that you would like to give in appreciation for the content, find a worthy charity and donate it there, whether it’s the homeless, cancer research or whatever you feel is important to you. They need it more than me.